oddly: one of the least romantic bridgertons despite some of the most romantic gestures. needed more epistolary. straight people cannot be helped.

also netflix has written themselves into a corner bc this plotline is like...bespoke torture for show eloise. like some 9th layer of hell saw trap shit. have no idea how they're gonna fix this one.

jan 2026 reread: yeah this is probably the best one of the series. which isn't saying much. but they're so easy to read & my brain needs the calories even if it's junk food. i'll get back to reading more nutritional content at some point.

--

cant believe this is my first book of the year coming up on june. cant believe it was so much better than that first half of s3. cant believe i’ve officially read 2 julia quinns. oh well. i actually had a really good time with this.

prevailing feeling as a longtime gladwell reader: uh oh pee paw is MAD. pee paw has not enjoyed these last few years in the US and canada and he is Gloves Off. your grandpa is out here using words like “circumspect” and he’s not even bothering to BCC. he’s just straight up CCing now.

anyway, gladwell always a fun time, like watching celebrity jeopardy. i learned fun facts about cheetahs. but there’s always that bit when you get to the end of the book and he’s summarizing, like, the sackler dynasty almost exclusively in terms he coined all by himself in such a way that he sounds like a marvel fan trying to explain their life’s obsession (“so then Thanos places the Infinity Stones in the Gauntlet to cause The Snap that wipes out The Avengers”) and it is kind of like “oh, you”

edit: oh wait wait wait in an incredibly off brand moment i forgot to mention the fact that he dedicates a whole chapter to how gay marriage was legalized and literally does not once talk about lesbians, like not even a cursory nod. if this book were somehow your first exposure to the concept of “being gay” it might not even occur to you that women could do it too. ridiculous.

hmm! i have no idea how to rate this! it's maggie stiefvater, one of my favorite authors, and she knows how to spin a yarn, but has decided that for her adult debut, she would like to eschew things like, uh...plot. as in: the stakes and structure and pacing are all muddy. it feels like you're on a dark ride you've been told is going to incline and then it just never does. to my dawning horror, the main relationship was a rote "there's this one guy who's kind of a cad, but then there's this other guy who's new and interesting? and Not a cad" heterosexual romance. maggie stiefvater! of all people! purveyor of fine hets! i think she was so excited to be writing adult that she forgot they had to do things other than fade to black. (no, she tries to put some emotion in it. she keeps saying, essentially, "these are the only two people who could ever understand each other" but then she just doesn't. make me. believe it?)

still, though: it's the stief. she's got, like, what, 50 books under her belt now? her narration is compulsively readable and she can always make you interested in what she's interested in, almost more journalist than fiction novelist. i loved the exploration of both luxury hotels and this one lesser known part of a war that has already been talked to death in the 80 years since its end. of course, west virginia is here (stiefvater), but i felt like the sweetwater and coal mining and post-depression appalachia weren't actually given their due?? the sweetwater is omnipresent, but it needed more to do, it was always just vaguely ~there~. we just get little hints of something more. i almost wrote "there should have been flashbacks"--but of course, there were! i dunno. should've been more flashbacks? should've been dropped at a more intentionally paced point in the narrative? should've been different flashbacks, told differently? i don't know, something's just not working here.

the best parts of this book are in the emotional moments, most of which happen in the last 10% and the greatest of which can be attributed to the character hannelore--who should have had more POV chapters!

also: my own fault, but i was listening to the audiobook and i misheard tucker being "black-haired" as tucker being black, as in, african-american. for some reason, i did not think, "what? let me roll that back." instead, i took to google! "black men fbi 1940s"??? yes, there were a few black men in the fbi in the 40s! wow! i guess that makes sense! surely maggie stiefvater discovered this little nugget and decided to deliberately employ it for her wwii novel! how delightful! i then proceeded to be bemused for a humiliatingly too-long chunk of the novel when the, uh, literal nazis were not kicking up much of a fuss about being interrogated by a black man in a position of authority. i was like "wow... these are really polite nazis (?) i guess she's setting up the powder keg for the back half of the book (?)" she was not. so you can take this whole review with a grain of salt, i can't read. or hear. or write ~~ (wrt the audiobook: i like the narrator, but i do think this is the sort of book that's best suited to the written word, if you can get it.)

alllll this to say: a step back from the dreamer trilogy! three stars? i guess? still waiting to see her take another whack at lesbian romance but that's just me.

hm this book is...not good. its the sort of not good that i could talk about for a cool 5,000 words but i would be doing myself a disservice. instead, i will post this

laura ramoso skit.

also anytime theo was like "why would anyone be in love with ME" i was like yeah i don't get it either. these characters are insufferable. this is like fanfiction for a ship i don't even enjoy in the source material, but now we've gone and made them boring with a real world AU. mcquiston is sooo referential, and there always has to be a moment where a song is dropped by name to hang the climax on.

also even when mcquiston stays away from politics, you can still see their entire hand of milquetoast queer white liberal cards. this novel caters to one specific west coast petit bourgeoise type of person who wants to do hashtag activism without having to stop wearing shein or overpronouncing the word "gelato".

also crazy that these characters are like "italy is sssssssso much more beautiful than disgusting america" bc people. people. youre from california. it's the same climate. you also get grapes and olives in california. i could show you a picture of california and tell you it's italy and you would believe me. okay okay okay i have to cut myself off before i go on forever i really do

glad i finally got around to this! was a good audiobook to have in the background while i painted. some combination of "witcher franchise now a household name" + "fairytale retellings" made this feel almost like a retelling itself. really fun even if all i want is ciri & family antics already. no idea how to rate it when i already know and love these characters. 3.5?

somewhere around 3.5, just across the board not as good as spinning silver; weaker characters, plot, and theme. spinning silver's clumsier and earlier sister, written before novik really got her legs underneath her. i'm not one to harp on magical age gaps, that's boring, so that wasn't a criticism for me, i just didn't think sarkan/agniezka was very compelling. would've sooner put her with kasia. oh, but i did like the sort of sorcery/druidicism vs wizardry conversation! get to see novik's neverwinter nights/dnd 3e roots.

This was enchanting! Everything [b:Deathless|8694389|Deathless|Catherynne M. Valente|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1316635864l/8694389._SX50_.jpg|10733651] should have been. I want to draw on comparisons to both [b:Howl’s Moving Castle|6294|Howl’s Moving Castle (Howl’s Moving Castle, #1)|Diana Wynne Jones|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1630502935l/6294._SX50_.jpg|2001] and, oddly, Pentiment (2022). (i.e., you can tell Naomi Novik respects and adores the past as a place to visit. She wants to do right by it.) I usually find medieval fantasy a snoozefest, but this one made me want to go crack open a history book and a jar of cherry preserves to stir into tea.

More impressive yet: the fairytale tropes manage to be enchanting rather than stale. Also one of the rare times when multiple POV first person past narration is exactly the right choice, and Novik is a skilled enough author to navigate through it. There are three main female characters with a few satellite perspectives, and you can tell which is which within a first few sentences. (One of them was easily cast in my head as Nicholas Hoult's Peter III.) Started on audiobook--which was very good, would recommend letting them get in your head--and popped over to the ebook around 25%.

Just--deftly done. Solid all the way through. Worthy of getting marked up with highlighter to present to your high school English teacher. Lots to chew on. There was a bit before the 50% mark when it felt like the plot should've been wrapping up--that we should've been at the 80% mark, absolute minimum--and I was baffled how she was going to stretch out the plot for another half of the novel, but I shouldn't have worried; it was exactly as long as it should be. Can't even complain that my f/f got sisterzoned because the het was exactly what it should have been, even when there was ample opportunity for some SJM-ian pitfalls. If it were 2012, I might even write something here about Spinning Silver being "a feminist novel," only that, in 2025, that's a nothing sentence.

Yeah. Not much else to say. Popping another Naomi Novik on the queue now.

i can't claim that this book is perfect or that it's for everyone, but if goodreads defines four stars as "it was really good" and five as "it was amazing"...then it was amazing!! it's everything i've ever wanted for so long!!!! the first amazing book i've read in years!!!!!! if traitor and monster took you to the depths of human despair, this one takes you through every possible emotion in the human catalogue. it has so much wisdom to give wrt empire and cultural relativism and systemic change and identity politics and empathy, not in what the characters say or think (although yes, there too) but lodged in the ribcage of the narrative structure, in every word on every page. also the ensemble of toxic lesbians is back and they are not fucking around. where is my tain shir x reader fanfiction >:/ we used to have a greyhound w ptsd and all she would do was lay on her side with all four limbs out and occasionally sigh and thats me abt tyrant. i don't even know how you WRITE this book. the skill required is as foreign to me as becoming an olympic gymnast or scaling mount everest. automatic fave.

all right! i'm ready for alecto! give it to me now! i am a parasite!